A crazed ex-con carjacked a 24-year-old medical student who stopped for coffee on the Lower East Side – then sexually tortured her during a harrowing twohour drive, cops said yesterday.

The terrified woman made her escape after suspect Richard Padilla, who was at the wheel of her 2003 Audi, cut off a patrol car at 119th Street and Second Avenue.

“He just raped me!” the woman screamed as she leaped from the passenger side of her car into the surprised officer’s arms.

The 41-year-old Padilla, a hardcore sex offender, was apparently trying to impersonate a New York State Police trooper when he grabbed his victim, officials said.

The woman’s nightmare began around 6 a.m. Monday.

Padilla – who was wearing a blue sweater with the initials NYSP on the collar – allegedly attacked her as she carried her cup of coffee back to her car from a Dunkin’ Donuts shop on Second Avenue between 10th and 11th streets.

Padilla told the frightened woman, an osteopathy student, that he had a gun, and forced her into the car.

During her terror trip, the kidnapper ordered her at times to lie down on the floor.

The woman – whose name was withheld – was driven to several spots in The Bronx where the 5-foot-6, 160-pound driver allegedly stopped to sodomize and grope her.

“As it happens, he didn’t have to impersonate a police officer. But that appears to be what he was doing,” said ADA Kerry O’Connell at Padilla’s arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court yesterday.

She described the suspect as a “picture-perfect sexual offender.”

Police said that Padilla, who lives in Huntington Station, L.I., was carrying a knapsack crammed with newspaper clippings of the 1991 sensational murder trial of Pamela Smart, who was sentenced to life in prison for masterminding the murder of her husband, Gregory.

Smart’s 15-year-old high school lover and three accomplices shot the man to death.

Padilla, who is married with children, also had an herbal aphrodisiac, a bogus State Police badge, a police scanner and nearly an ounce of marijuana in his pack, officials said.

Jay Styles, who works at the Gabaron Salon on East 119th Street, said he saw Padilla under arrest and his victim sitting in a car.

“She was sitting in the back seat with her shoes off,” he said.

“She looked very upset, very shaken up.”

Padilla was held without bail on charges of kidnapping, committing a criminal sexual act, sexual abuse and criminal possession of marijuana.

The ex-con served two years in prison for sexual assault and was released in 1989.